SUPPLY CHAIN ARTICLES

  • Can America's Retreat On mRNA Be Europe's Opportunity?

    With HHS winding down mRNA vaccine development under BARDA, could Europe seize the opportunity to lead in mRNA innovation? Exploring the policy shift's implications.

  • How Can We Move RNA Forward In Our Therapeutics Arsenal?

    RNA technologies, including mRNA therapeutics, have emerged as a promising drug modality. However, they have unique challenges. BioPhorum has dedicated a team to investigate these challenges and this Q&A shares their practical considerations for how to move this field forward.

  • Sourcing Plasmid DNA From CDMOs Got More Challenging — Here's Why

    The demand for plasmid DNA products is intrinsically linked to unique market conditions and funding environments. Here's what's driving them.

  • Cultivating A Thriving mRNA Ecosystem: Key Initiatives & Future Directions

    Overall, I felt that the following initiatives/talking points were demonstrative of the types of creativity and symbiosis that we will need much more of in the near and long-term to foster a healthy and fruitful RNA ecosystem. 

  • What Violin Making Can Teach Us About mRNA Therapeutic Quality

    Managing the mRNA supply chain and working in mRNA process development may not look anything like the work a luthier does to hew an instrument from an ancient spruce tree. But violin craftmanship actually serves as a fantastic metaphor for the challenging work the mRNA therapeutics space is tackling in sourcing and qualifying raw materials and optimizing the critical IVT reaction.

  • Inside Alnylam's Playbook For High Volume siRNA Production

    As one of the first companies to establish a chemoenzymatic ligation platform, Alnylam's Maines and Nechev are in the perfect position to espouse wisdom on the practical aspects and remaining challenges of implementing enzymatic ligation at a large scale. Here in this installment, Maines and Nechev outline what they’ve learned thus far about the science of enzymatic ligation, while also paying credence to the unknowns and existing barriers that, as a frontrunner, Alnylam will inevitably (but willingly) be tasked with facing in the future.

SUPPLY CHAIN VIDEOS

In this Advancing RNA Live clip, CMC consultant Sujit Jain unpacks the levels of maturity he’s observed in process and analytical development, as well as supply chain. While vaccines and liver-targeting therapeutics boast what we can call a reproducible platform today, targeted LNP therapies introduce a handful of scale-up sensitivities and characterization hurdles.

As CRISPR technology evolves beyond the original Cas9, gRNAs are transitioning from simple targeting tools into highly engineered, complex molecules. In this Advancing RNA Live segment, speakers April Sena, Max De Long, and Venkat Krishnamurthy discuss how the rise of diverse nucleases — including prime editors — is impacting gRNA synthesis and purity.

This Advancing RNA Live clip dives into the biggest challenges in mRNA purification and the critical debate on where to focus investment. Here, our three mRNA PD experts argue for a holistic process development strategy, challenging the traditional wisdom of optimizing the upstream process at any cost.

While we can make lots of mRNA at a smaller scale, when it comes to scaling up to kg quantities of mRNA, our current batch processes leave a lot to be desired. Together, Stu Sundseth of Tune Therapeutics and Christian Dohmen of Ethris unpack the biggest barriers to scaling IVT to achieve the desired yield and quality of mRNA, offering their take on how the field is innovating to overcome these issues. 

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